What's unfortunate, say Souza and other experts, is that by evaluating a site's ease of use after it's designed, e-tailers often realize way too late that they've plunked down millions of dollars to build a site that leaves visitors muddled and annoyed - and certainly not in the mood to pull out their wallets. EFrenzy, of course, is guilty as charged. When the site launched in February 1999, admits Stephen Lake, eFrenzy's CEO, it was less-than-stellar. While Lake describes his company as "customer obsessed," he hired Vividence because he realized eFrenzy needed to better understand those customers.
It's a common enough problem for Web sellers, who start out focused on building infrastructure. Mired in operational challenges such as how to provide fulfillment, how to ship products and how to get attention in the marketplace, it can take a dot-com as long as three years (three years!) to get around to customer concerns, says Elaine Rubin, chairman of the trade association Shop.org. And once they do take a hard look at their Web site, e-tailers are slow to realize the problems. "E-tailers often design a Web site to show how smart they are, instead of using good methodology for selling products to customers," says Jakob Nielsen, principal at Nielsen Norman Group, which charges $30,000 for a Web usability consultation. Nielsen, the author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, has helped the BBC, Keen.com, the Motley Fool (dossier) and KBkids.com (dossier).
According to Nielsen, the problem of the abandoned shopping cart has long been misunderstood. Conventional wisdom has it that Web shoppers flee because of sticker shock - having arrived at checkout, they see their total order price and leave. That does happen, Nielsen says, but it's emblematic of a larger problem. Most users, he says, find it so difficult to get around e-tail sites that they park items in a shopping cart simply so that they'll be able to find them again to weed through later. Customers get cold fingers for other reasons, as well: Most e-tailers don't give shipping costs upfront or tell users if the product is in stock, so customers often arrive at the checkout step only to be surprised and irritated by expensive shipping charges or a lengthy shipment delay. Nielsen preaches honesty: Give customers all the information up front and they'll trust you more.
Often a visitor will abandon a shopping cart because the site itself is badly designed. Perhaps products are poorly described or photos are unflattering. Or, forgetting that most people are worried about security and privacy issues, an e-tailer will ask too many probing, personal questions, leaving the customer paranoid. "To buy something, a customer has to go through the Spanish Inquisition," says Nielsen. "You have to register with a unique username, answer too many questions, read statements about the site's 'community.'" He adds, "In a physical store, I like a sweater, I try it on, go to the cashier, buy it and leave. The goal is to separate the money from the customer quickly. In the e-commerce world, it's the opposite."
To see how Vividence goes about analyzing and addressing such missteps, I followed Karen Fullerton, Vividence's top sales rep, as she went on sales calls and nursed her clients through the testing process. On a warmish day, we met in Fullerton's favorite coffeehouse in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco, then proceeded to her sales calls in her green 1994 Saab. Tagging along with her verified one truism: Web sites need to be more customer-driven. As Fullerton asked client after client about their customers, the inevitable response was a deer-in-the-headlights look. Basic questions - Who are your primary customers? What do they want? - were met with fear, fidgeting, fingernail chewing.
At least when Fullerton pitched eFrenzy, the company's employees weren't quite so naive. Sara Edelman, eFrenzy's director of research, had specific concerns about navigation and site design. Fullerton told Edelman and her team how the testing process works and talked about cost: $25,000 gets an e-tailer a test with 50 users; $35,000 gets the customer a more statistically accurate 200 users. (EFrenzy went the 50-tester route.) The price is all-inclusive; along with the test, the customer receives a presentation by an analyst who digs through the resulting data. "We answer the questions that keep them up at night," Fullerton says.
Persuaded, eFrenzy signed a contract with Vividence. The first task was to spell out the mission of the research: To understand the difficulties faced by eFrenzy customers as they navigated the site. The Vividence team drafted a series of questions and then searched their list of testers for 50 who fit eFrenzy's target demo. Then, finally, Vividence ran the test.
The testers were told to take a few minutes to explore the site and comment about their experience. Then they were asked to accomplish a specific task, in this case to find a carpet cleaner in a certain ZIP code for less than $150. The testers downloaded the special Vividence browser, which records where they go and allows them to comment on why they took certain paths. The whole eFrenzy test took about 45 minutes.
After the testers finished their work, Vicki Valandra, the Vividence "engagement manager" responsible for dissecting and presenting the data, cranked out 91 single-spaced pages of quantitative and qualitative data, ready for interpretation. "It involves a lot of hours," Valandra says dryly.
